LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



MAIMONIDES 



PAPER READ BEFORE THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 

ANN ARBOR, MICH., JANUARY ig, 189O 



BY 

RABBI LOUIS GROSSMANN, D.D., 

AUTHOR OF ' ' JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION " 



c oPYRiSHr ^ 
m 7 1890 ' 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 

G, P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
Jmickerbocktr Jjttss 
1890 



COI YRIGHT BY 

LOUIS GROSSMANN 
1890 



1Xbe Tknickerbocto iptess, 1Re\v J£)orfe 

Printed and Bound by 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 



MAIMONIDES. 



BEFORE entering upon the presentation of 
my theme, I beg you to have indulgence with 
the amateur manner in which I shall deal with 
it. I am not trained sufficiently in speculative 
matters, and I feel that, when I accepted the 
honoring invitation to lecture before this 
learned society, I assumed a responsibility 
beyond the measure of my strength. But the 
name of Maimonides is dear to me, and my 
love for this master-mind emboldens me to at- 
tempt to speak in his behalf, especially in view 
of the fact that he is referred to mostly only 
incidentally, and that his philosophy is rarely 
a special topic. I flatter myself, therefore, 
that my tentative description will not be taken 
amiss. I bespeak for my subject the interest 
which it deserves, and for myself your kind and 
lenient judgment. 

It is my intention to sketch in as terse a 
manner as I can a few of the most striking 
features of the philosophy of Maimonides. I 



2 



Maimonides. 



am sure I need not premise that it is not pos- 
sible to report, respecting any of the mediaeval 
philosophers, a system in the strict sense of 
the word. They are more or less discursive, 
and the most of them are committed to the 
advocacy of some special matter, and hence 
their speculation is clogged and unwieldy. 
Maimonides is hampered by the foible of his 
age. You cannot read a page of the " More 
Nebuchim " without feeling a regret at the 
spectacle of this Prometheus in Jewish litera- 
ture bound to the rock of dogmatism. 

In a rough estimate, we may class him 
amongst philosophers of religion. He means 
to show that a reconciliation between religion 
and philosophy is possible. But the Bible is 
to him still an oracle, which ought in all cases to 
yield the right response. Be it remarked here, 
however, that Maimonides is more susceptible 
to suggestions coming from textual criticism 
than, perhaps, the majority of Spanish-Jewish 
writers, with the exceptions of the Kimchi's 
and more especially of Abraham ibn Esra. 
Maimonides does not hesitate to abandon the 
traditional version of the Bible when it comes 
into conflict with what is proved to be other- 
wise incontrovertible. It was a dictum of his 
that reason must be the test of faith ; nothing 
that contradicts reason can be an object of 
belief, or can form a part of valid religion. 



Maimonides. 



3 



We have here an anticipation by six centuries 
of the " Kritik der reinen Vernunft." He can- 
didly confessed that he would willingly have 
rejected the biblical account of creation if 
Aristotle had succeeded in proving conclusively 
the eternity of matter. In this sense he has 
frequently recourse to a kind of exegesis which 
is extremely interesting, and which would form 
no unimportant datum in a history of the 
efforts toward rational interpretation of the 
Bible. His advice to novices in dialectic 
studies is: never to be deceived by the literal- 
ness of the biblical text. For it is evident, he 
says, that there has been made popular a cer- 
tain mode of divine portraiture (called techni- 
cally anthromorphism and anthropopathism) 
which, on the face of it, is nothing short of 
blasphemy. (This is not to be charged to the 
authors of the Bible so much as to the want of 
critical discernment in the readers.) 

This part of Jewish philosophy is really 
foreign to the subject we have in hand, and 
I will therefore pass it over. Our attention 
is to be turned not to what was the position 
of Maimonides regarding the Bible. He was 
a leader in mediaeval Jewish exegetics and 
hermeneutics, but we wished simply to show 
in retrospect how Maimonides stands related 
in this matter to his predecessors. The matter 
is incidental merely to the special question 



4 



Maimonides. 



which Maimonides had set himself to deter- 
mine : How is Judaism related to metaphysics ? 
The exposition of biblical doctrine was merely 
the point of departure. None of the Jewish 
philosophers had had the courage to seize upon 
the matter with decision. Maimonides was 
the first one to put the issue plainly and dis- 
tinctly, and I may add, to his credit, in con- 
trast with the scholiasts, who never thought it 
serious enough to consider it at all. It is true 
that, among Jewish thinkers, Saadja had, cen- 
turies before Maimonides, treated of faith and 
reason ; but more as to the contrast between 
these than to demonstrate a reconciliation of 
them. Saadja had, in fact, done ample service 
when he subjected the dogmas of Judaism, 
current and accepted in his day, to a searching 
scrutiny and to the test of logic. Philo already 
had sought the alliance of the Greek schools of 
thought, that they might help to corroborate 
revealed religion ; and that it might become 
evident that the Mosaic dispensation was in 
keeping with what was the speculative fashion 
of his day. But these previous essays were 
radically different from the purpose of Maimon- 
ides. His concern it was to dispose of the 
hostility which it was alleged obtained essen- 
tially between Mosaism per se and the cos- 
mic philosophy of the Arabs. It was a more 
troublesome matter than all these former ones 



Maimanides. 



5 



to reconcile revealed religion with the funda- 
mentals of a discipline which was bold enough 
to call itself a philosophy of the universe. 
The opponents had become quite formidable. 
There were no greater astronomers than the 
Orientals, and no other study is likely to 
induce sooner the apprehension of system vast 
and grand than the science of the heavenly 
bodies. In the face of this, to abide by a 
dogmatic self-assertion for a few disjointed 
subtleties would certainly have been futile. 

Besides, the philosophy of Aristotle had be- 
come naturalized on Arabic ground. Jews had 
translated his works, and had opened them up 
to the thinking world of Arabia, and, in this 
roundabout way, finally to Christianity. Greek 
philosophy had experienced a singular resusci- 
tation. When the Occidental world had long 
ceased to study. Arabia teemed not only with 
faithful translations of Aristotle, but with 
scholarly dissertations and annotations; even 
later on the Christian world was stolidly con- 
tent with mangled citations from these eastern 
sources. It may be maintained for the Jews 
that for this spread of philosophic study 
they did the largest part. It is well known 
that, in a large number of Moslem univer- 
sities of Spain, they occupied presidential 
positions and professors' chairs, and that 
the aid of Jewish savants was sought for 



6 



Maimonides. 



the schools which the Church felt called upon 
— in rivalry with these seats of learning — 
to establish for its vindication and fostering. 
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas are to 
be considered disciples of Jews, strange though 
it may seem. Dr. Jost has made out a clear 
case of the debt which Albertus Magnus owes 
to Maimonides, and Emile Saisset, the eminent 
professor of Catholic dialectics, goes so far in 
his admission of the dependence of Thomas 
Aquinas upon the same Maimonides that he 
states: "The More Nebuchim is the forerunner 
of the Summa of Aquinas." Even in Eng- 
land the revival and re-enforcement of scientific 
study were drawn from Jewish sources. Friar 
Bacon is a pupil of a Jewish Rabbi, and 
among the earliest professors at Oxford were 
Jewish teachers of mathematics, astronomy, 
and medicine. I need not refer with any addi- 
tional emphasis to the fact that during the 
Middle Ages, nearly all, if not all, the body 
physicians to Kings, Emperors, popes and 
potentates were Jews, amongst them our 
Moses Maimonides. I mention it beside the 
other less gratifying fact that this distinction 
was bought by the Jews at a heavy price. The 
prominence of the Jewish practitioners and 
teachers aggravated the ill-will of the populace, 
and it was made an occasion for much vindic- 
tiveness. 



Maimonides. 



1 



The many-sided intellectual ambition of the 
Jews helped to preserve for Europe Aristotle, 
the master of philosophy. It was a service, for 
the want of which, it may be, the discipline of 
the schools would have been useless. The 
version of Church doctrine received by it the 
admirable consistence and severe uniformity — 
attributes for which the history of the Catholic 
Church stands pre-eminent. Aristotle is the 
backbone of the scholiasts. Though Plato 
had been an earlier favorite of Christianity, 
it was felt later on that the new faith needed 
no more mere poetic exhilaration. To that 
Platonism, in its pure phase, and Neo-plato- 
nism, much more recondite, amounted. The 
idealism of Plato, as well as the fantastic va- 
garies of Philonic logos-dreamery, could never, 
it was felt soon after the consolidation of the 
separate churches, serve as a material subven- 
tion. The Church, in that stage of its life, need- 
ed a substructure of absolutism. A late attempt 
to foist Hegelianism upon Christianity has 
proved that the time has gone by when ideal- 
ism can bear upon Christian apologetics. He- 
gelianism had to go, just as Platonism had to 
yield to Aristotelianism. 

It must be remembered that Maimonides 
did not fail in sufficient insight in this matter. 
The paramount concern of his mind was, that 
by the philosophy of the absolute to deter- 



8 



Maimonides. 



mine that the unity and continuity, not merely 
popular but fundamental, between the biblical 
and the post-biblical phases of Judaism could 
be established. He knew that that could 
be consummated only by a method of con- 
straining logical evidence. Aristotelianism had 
been classical before the time of Maimonides ; 
but he was the first to see utility in the current 
authority, and most especially the first to 
undertake the proof of the identity between 
natural religion and philosophy. I say natural 
religion, though I do not wish to intimate that 
Maimonides used the term in the modern sense. 
But he eliminates priestly accretion so much 
from Mosaism, pure and simple, that we are 
justified in saying that he must have conceived 
a generic kind of religion, or a simple primitive 
faith. In all his references to traditional forms 
and practices, he shifts, too persistently not to 
be intentional, from a philosophic to the theo- 
logic position. I put in evidence for this two- 
fold meaning of religion in Maimonides the 
order and sequence of the subjects as they 
follow one another in the " Mere Nebuchim." 
Abarbanel, the masterly commentator and ex- 
pounder of the " More," has established that 
most clearly. The breaking up of the concept 
of religion into original and traditional con- 
stituents, was novel ; it naturally encountered 
opposition. Jehuda Halevi contravened it 



Maimonides. 



9 



in his now famous "Cusari." Judaism, this 
poet-philosopher maintained, has had its 
fit exposition wholly neither by biblical au- 
thorities alone, nor by the light which the 
peripatetic school could throw upon these. 
It has had its exemplification and its only 
faithful portraiture in history. We are bound 
to acknowledge that by this recognition of the 
significance of history as incontrovertible testi- 
mony, Jehuda Halevi is on the true path. But 
upon the question which was at issue, of co- 
ordinating revealed religion and derivative 
religion, this has no bearing. He simply turned 
his back upon dialectics peremptorily. 

I cite the case of the " Cusari," because it 
presents another instance of the fact how seduc- 
tive idealism is. The " Cusari " is thoroughly 
Platonic, though modified by the additional 
feature, not congenital with Platonism, that it 
pleads for the significance of history. The 
poetic attitude gave occasion and prestige to 
Kabbalistic mysticism. Mysticism is the most 
unfortunate of all phases in the history of 
thought. This tide of the Kabbala, which 
threatened to engulf rationalism amongst the 
Jews, was stemmed by Maimonides. Immedi- 
ately after his death, however, I regret to re- 
port, this creation of diseased minds celebrated 
its orgies in a grim "dance to death" of all 
rational endeavor. 



IO 



Maimonides. 



I wish to mention here by way of parenthesis 
another of the Platonists in Judaism, one, whose 
name, for a long time a mystery, has been re- 
stored by the learned M. Munk, the librarian 
of the National Library and member of the 
French Academy. It is Avicebron, whom also 
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas quote 
with deference, as we found them quoting Mai- 
monides. His work is the " Fons Vitae," and 
his real name Salomo ibn Gebirol, the poet. 
We have no occasion here to refer to this in- 
teresting work more explicitly. 

In attending to the reasons which Maimoni- 
des proposed for a friendly intimacy between 
philosophy and religion, we must remember 
that the consideration of this subject will bring 
us into quaint matters. These because of their 
peculiar idiom may seem trivial. But it is just 
that this phase of Maimonidian thought be de- 
scribed in its own terminology. It lacks pre- 
cision and Kantian vigor ; but it has served as 
a vehicle in Jewish philosophy for more than 
seven centuries and is current in it to-day. 

The cosmology of that time was built upon 
the doctrine of Emanation. One sphere gave 
life to another sphere, and the graduation of 
these, one into the other, made up a chain 
of ascending dignity in spiritual personality. 
Each sphere was ensouled. We cannot easily 
think ourselves into this peculiar account of 



Maimonides, 



universal life. Copernicus, Keppler, Newton, 
and Laplace have happily made it strange 
for us. Maimonides thought there were con- 
centric circles of spherical layers around the 
earth, one superimposed upon the other,— 
water, air, fire. The moon was another one 
of these spheres. Above it those of Mercury, 
Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the 
planets. Lastly, a fictitious sphere, which 
revolves daily and drags all other spheres by 
sympathy. We would suppose that this is 
simply a mechanical explanation of terrestrial 
and astral phenomena. But in this astronomy 
the spheres are alive. Each is separately an 
emanation from each preceding one, and the 
rotation of each and of all is continuous and 
eternal ; and since they are interdependent 
and interact, and their rotation is well defined 
and has a definite aim, each of them, because 
of its distinctive purpose and movement, gives 
evidence of a resident intelligence. These 
separate intelligences are in essence different 
one from the other. The diversity of phe- 
nomena and the mutuality of their relationship 
are thus accounted for by mythologic and, 
indeed, light metaphysics. But it is still true 
that modern philosophy and science have not 
been able to clinch the matter more firmly. 

Maimonides had to some extent emanci- 
pated himself from this Mohammedan cos- 



12 



Maimonides. 



mogony. He was constrained, however, to 
start from it, if he would hope to meet ob- 
jections of another kind. The first chapter of 
Genesis and the first of Ezekiel had long been 
" mysteries of the Law/' the esoterism of the 
Bible. Jewish thinkers had imported into 
them matters at once foreign and contradic- 
tory to the basal facts of Judaism. Kabbalistic 
literature from beginning to end is a tediously 
extravagant play with these two passages of 
the Bible. 

Maimonides protested against such perver- 
sion and abuse of the fair name of biblical 
authors. He would have nothing to do with 
allegories and types and angelology. He ad- 
mitted that the literal aspect of the passages 
was inadequate and, considering their reputedly 
eminent source, ludicrously inexact. He saw 
the necessity of some sort of helpful comment. 
He could under no circumstances suppose that 
the materialistic description of the Divine Be- 
ing could be meant seriously. Some apology 
would have to be made for them. 

In the first place, he emphasized, as very 
proper and wise, theTalmudic maxim that the 
Thora employs such diction as is likely to be 
most communicative. Hence not much more 
is to be made of instances in which the Bible 
speaks of the eye of God, of the hand of God, 
of the anger of God, and the like, than can be 



Maimonides. 



*3 



made out of any rhetorical phraseology which 
is employed only to convey an abstract thought. 
If any significance does attach to such conve- 
nient terms, it lies most probably not in each 
singly, but in the fact that certain figurative 
appellations, with reference to God, used inva- 
riably under similar circumstances, show that 
there is a method in the use of them. To 
subject such regularly and persistently applied 
tropes to some scrutiny is legitimate work, 
and by it we might arrive at a well-established 
system of biblical interpretation. To such in- 
vestigation Maimonides devoted the first part 
of the " More," and this may be regarded as 
very humble prolegomena for a philosophy of 
language. 

Here then is the first opportunity in which 
we can see the stand he took, from the side of 
profane philosophy, regarding the widely dis- 
tributed cosmogony and the much-cherished 
-fostering of mysticism, which the first had en- 
gendered. The theory that the universe is a 
chain of spherical agency, is an importation 
into Judaism from foreign sources. Maasse 
Bereshith and Maasse Merkabah were reduced 
and eliminated by the logic of hermeneutics to 
popular phrases which have no other signifi- 
cance than to serve to make things more easily 
intelligible. Thus rational Judaism got easily 
rid of a very unwelcome intruder. 



Maimonides. 



The four categories of Aristotle provided 
the constructive part of the " More." I will 
state it in this way: Every object, according 
to Aristotle, is composite, being a bundle of 
matter, form, efficient cause, and final cause. 
Upon efficient cause Maimonides based the 
cosmological proof of the existence of a God. 
All phenomena, when traced even to the most 
distant regression, are reducible to a primal 
efficient cause. The contrast between " mat- 
ter " and " form " furnishes another proof of the 
existence of God. The 7tpcotr] vkrf (the original 
matter) logically presupposes a npobTov nivovv 
(an original force). This latter is isolated, 
and to it no movement can be communicated. 
This " Essence," the First Form, then, is 
God. 

The ontological proof, unlike the more re- 
cent modification of it, is based upon the fact 
that the world is, as Aristotle would say, 
wholly a flood of potentialities into actualiza- 
tion. This transition from latent condition 
into real state must proceed through some 
supreme agent. This is all in strict obedi- 
ence to Aristotelian authority. Maimonides 
adopted additionally the following corrobora- 
tive proofs. 

The unity of God is an absolute one. If 
there existed two divine beings this absolute- 
ness would be logically impossible. On the 



Maimonides. 



15 



one hand, they would have in common the fact 
of divinity ; on the other hand, there would 
have to be some reason why we should dis- 
criminate one from the other. To be what 
they are they would have to be both common 
and special, which of course excludes ultimate 
condition. Again, it cannot be supposed that 
two respectively exclusive deities voluntarily 
divided authority between them, for wherein 
shall the compromise lie ? In a division of 
labor? Is not the fact of such an arrangement 
an evidence of inferiority, since their absolute- 
ness would be hampered? At any rate the 
yielding up of authority and power must have 
some ground (for nothing can be ungrounded, 
even in a God), and if there is a reason for it, 
then evidently the reason is an extraneous 
constraint ; and this makes absoluteness ab- 
surd. 

I should like to be more detailed in the 
demonstration which Maimonides gives of the 
existence of a God ; as I should like also to 
refer, more than by a passing notice, to the 
care recommended by him regarding the pre- 
eminently Jewish notion that God is one. The 
philosophical aspect of God's essence must not 
be confounded with a numerical commonplace. 
Unity is referable to God only in the sense 
that in Him no such coincidence of form and 
matter takes place as is attributable, according 



i6 



Maimonides. 



to peripateticism, to transitory phenomena. 
God is one, as the absolute essence. 

But we must hurry on. In the philosophy 
of Maimonides, perhaps more so than else- 
where in Jewish literature, the relationship 
between God and the world is conceived to 
be intimate. God is the form of the world ; 
without His direction we could not conceive 
how the world is continuous. He is not simply 
a dens ex machine, who has once performed His 
service of creation and is thence dismissed for 
eternal indolence. Since God is u form/' every 
origination of a terrestrial phenomenon springs 
out of the bosom of His infinite opulence. Re- 
garding this point Spinoza has been charged 
with discipleship of Maimonides, which Prof. 
Caird, in his u Life of Spinoza," takes pains to 
disprove. But there is no necessity to claim 
more than that Maimonides is in this, as nearly 
everywhere, on the ground of Aristotelianism. 
Maimonides' God is the sublimation of one .of 
too contradictory terms, which stand forever in 
the world in irreconcilable opposition. Spi- 
noza's Pan is one substance, out of which matter, 
as its cognate, flows as water flows out of the 
spring. 

By the establishment of an ever-present God 
(and an ever-active one) Maimonides has re- 
deemed the Bible and Jewish theology (per- 
haps all theology) of a very formidable charge. 



Maimonides. 



17 



I proceed to state it tersely. It is a common 
practice to speak of God as the Creator; but 
the nature of His present whereabouts and oc- 
cupation is not made out. Granted that " in 
the beginning " He " created heaven and earth," 
where has He kept himself ever since, seeing 
that the providential plan is getting along so 
well in His absence? 

Maimonides answers it thus : God is not 
only the " form," but also the " final cause " of 
the world. In other words, He is not only the 
occasion that brought the world into being, but 
also their purpose. This teleological turn is 
admirable, and it is vital. God did not make 
things as they are simply in the capacity of a 
mechanic, but as an artist, fitting the material 
to its proper use in the economy of things. 
This is a weighty word for optimism, that wis- 
dom is resident in the world, and that the 
world is preparing a glorious mise en scene of 
the best. 

In this sense, I mean my assertion that Mai- 
monides has brought God and nature into im- 
mediate and intimate relation, and has given 
ample consolation for the disparaging events 
of accident, in an abiding conviction that the 
cosmos is normal and moral. 

I wish now to pass to the consideration of 

another theme of Maimonidian speculation. 

We have so far considered God and nature. 
2 



% 



i8 



Maimonides. 



Two other topics are still left to be presented. 
The first is, what relation is there between man 
and nature ; and the second, what relation sub- 
sists between God and man ? The question, 
what position man has in the cosmos, was not 
indigenous to mediaeval thought. The identity 
of the physical basis in all organic beings was 
recognized ; but a generic kinship of man and 
animal, on the ground of soul-life, was incon- 
ceivable to the school of Maimonides, for the 
reason that the notion " organism " was not 
known to them. Organism is not simply a 
body which is ensouled, but a body which 
possesses co-ordinated functions. It is true 
they supposed the universe inspirited, but in a 
mythological sense, or at least in a restricted 
sense, something like the occasionalism of 
Guelinx. To the conception of a possible 
fundamental identity in the two aspects of 
being (material and spiritual), none of the 
Jewish thinkers, as none of the others, had 
attained. Within the compass of physical life 
man was scarcely more significant than any 
other instance of atomic aggregate. The 
eminence of the human species lay rather in 
another direction; the soul of man was pre- 
eminent among all other instances of life. 

Within the psychology of the individual 
there were (a) a vegetative soul ; (b) a sensa- 
tional soul ; (c) an imaginative soul ; (d) an ap- 



Maimonides. 



l 9 



petitive soul ; (e) a rational soul. Similarly there 
was the soul of the mineral, of the vegetable, 
of the animal, world. The definition of soul 
as preferred by Maimonides is : " The form " 
*of a thing is its soul. We can guess what the 
soul of man would be. 

And still we must not allow the impression 
to gain upon us that Maimonides did not posit 
any thing with reference to the intrinsic dignity 
of man. It is possible for man alone, he says, 
to grow in strength of mental vision so that he 
can come into communion with the absolute. 
There is a gradation in the mental experiences 
of man. At first his intellect is simply hylic. 
The essence of things is hid from him, and the 
potentialities are undiscovered because they 
are hidden under a heap of materialities. He 
knows phenomena only as separate and indi- 
vidual things. His second stage is a growth. 
Here the mind seizes upon abstracts. In the 
highest status of mentality, finally, the mind 
reverts upon itself through the intermediate 
stage of perception and conception. Intellec- 
tual susceptibilities, potentialities in the things, 
apperception by the mind, — these three are 
wedded by Maimonides into congenite unity. 

The second question, how is God related to 
man? and vice vers&, brings us into the pres- 
ence of the subject of morals, and, as a very 
vital part, of the question of free will. 



20 Maimonides. 



Maimonides has treated the subject of free 
will very definitely. He posits the following : 
Man has been endowed with complete free- 
dom to choose the good or the evil ; he alone 
of all creatures discriminates between these 
by his reason, though the transition from a 
mental attitude toward these ethical alterna- 
tives does not entail that the corresponding 
act and conduct must follow. Allow me to 
insert here the remark that Maimonides em- 
phasized the total separation of cognition by 
the mind from the enlistment of the mind for 
conduct, in opposition to the Dschabarites, a 
Mohammedan sect. This sect had won danger- 
ous prestige, and since it was a fatalistic school, 
Maimonides desired to stem its ingratiating in- 
fluence. Before Maimonides it had been be- 
coming less offensive to believe that, inasmuch 
as God is omnipotent, man could not, in any 
way, assert himself. Volition was stigmatized 
by the blighting frown of these fatalists. 

" Do not think," he says, " as some much 
misguided people do, that God foreordains 
immediately at the inception of a man's life 
what he shall be, whether righteous or wicked ; 
nay, every man becomes what he himself de- 
termines to be. One is compassionate, the 
other hard-hearted ; one is miserly, the other 
liberal, according to his own predilection. There 
is no constraint. According to a dictate from 



Maimonides. 



21 



within, man chooses the way he will go. In 
the sphere of moral selection the law of caus- 
ality does not obtain as it does in nature, as if 
the will of a man were simply the effect of 
some cause to which he is implicitly subject. 
The will of a man is primarily the source of all 
his actions." 

" And," he continues, " it is true an objection 
might naturally obtrude itself upon our atten- 
tion. If the human will is sovereign, in what 
sense shall we comprehend the equally valid 
truth that God is all-powerful? Does not, by 
the allowance to man of such self-mastery, the 
divine omnipotence suffer much disdain, nay, 
does it not become logically impossible?" 

This is his answer : " The freedom of the 
human will is itself a determination on the 
part of God when he created man, just as is 
the natural law, according to which, for in- 
stance, light, gaseous bodies rise and heavy- 
stuff particles sink. God has prescribed to 
every thing its specific character. The dis- 
tinctive character of the human being in this 
sense is his free will " (or as we would put it 
perhaps more adequately, it is the mode, the 
law of his being). 

There is a second objection possible against 
the conjunction of personal free will with 
divine absoluteness. It might be justly con- 
strued that free will, as it acts arbitrarily and 



22 



Maimonides. 



occasionally, is inconsistent with and clashes 
with divine omniscience. God fore-knows, if 
in the sense of absoluteness he knows at all. 
When, therefore, God knows events and doings, 
it is tantamount, in divine logic, to their being 
at the very moment objective realities. How 
then can there obtain any alternatives for man 
to choose from, if as soon as God has fixed it, 
man is confined to what He has determined ? 

To this objection Maimonides replies rather 
apodictically. The entire matter need not 
trouble us. For the relation, as alleged, is 
impossible. God is absolute, and of a positive 
essence, like the absolute, we can say nothing. 
God's essence and God's cognition are not, as 
in the economy of human mentality, antece- 
dent and consequent, as if it were brain and 
sensuous impressions carried to the brain. In 
God unity admits of no discreteness. We know 
nothing of how God knows, nor can we, in the 
strict sense, say at all that God knows. For in 
our terminology knowing presupposes faculty 
for perception, conception, abstraction, and 
naming. All these are phases of mind-activity, 
where mind is distinct from and simply the tool 
of a spiritual personality. But in the divine per- 
son mind is not a subordinate instrumentality, 
for the absolute has no such division of labor 
in its make-up. We are, therefore, unable to 
declare any thing as to God's omniscience, and 



Maimonides. 



23 



we cannot say that human freedom is in any 
way affected by the absolute essence of God. 

In this way Maimonides disposes of the 
difficulties, which are in the way of an harmo- 
nization of the seeming opposites of free will 
and divine fore-knowledge. But this matter 
brings us close to another question not quite 
so perplexing and insurmountable. 

Whence comes responsibility ? If freedom 
is an endowment, what is its exact nature ? 
and what is its source ? Freedom and liberty 
are synonyms in the popular vocabulary, but 
the distinction between them is very marked 
when they are employed with some nicety. 
Freedom is inalienable ; liberty is a privilege. 
Freedom is an ethical condition ; liberty a 
civil grant. Freedom is a positive and lasting 
property; liberty an immunity from incidental 
obligation. Unlike liberty, freedom is an ha- 
bitual state of soul. In this normal, original, 
and continuous state there must be a personal 
administration, an unconditional dictate, so 
that the aim of the individual and the destiny 
of the race are served best. This is the basis 
of ethics. The consideration of it is eminently 
a question of ethical philosophy. With Mai- 
monides it is closely related to theology on 
the one side, and, as we shall see, with science 
on the other. 

There is no question to the solution of which 



24 



Maimonides. 



the philosopher ought to bring his acumen to 
bear more directly than upon the question of 
the origin, the character, the content of the 
notion of right. I submit the proposition that 
our mental discipline, the insight we have got 
into history, the profound method of compari- 
son of which we make use in all branches of 
archaeology, language, mythology, and religion, 
and finally the analysis of psychology, will 
bring a supreme benefit. For they will make 
more practicable a science of ethics. We make 
shift practically with amateur morals. From 
the aspect of scientific study we are content 
with reassuring ourselves that our maxims, 
customs, and habits do not run counter to our 
critical sense, and that they have the authority 
of history and the consensus of our cotempo- 
raries. The faults common to divergent theo- 
logical systems of morals can be subsumed 
under the one radical one : they all beg the 
question ; none is in alliance with the only re- 
liable method of comparison, which, though as 
yet in its infancy, will turn out to be the most 
fertile and efficient. And let me add, there 
can be no well substantiated classification of 
moral precepts, except on the basis of psychol- 
ogy. And by that I do not mean merely a 
graduation of psychological phenomena, the 
abstract study of soul-experiences. I have in 
mind a treatment of the history of ethics, so 



Maimonides. 



25 



that its manifold, divergent, and conflicting 
facts will yield something besides a classifica- 
tion of moral maxims. The history of culture 
will show that there is a basal unity in the 
logic, the psychology, and the morals of every 
epoch and that these are mutually dependent 
one upon the other. There is no such thing 
possible as common-sense contradicting itself 
anywhere. 

But let us return to the consideration of 
what were the principles of Maimonides re- 
garding ethics. He shares with many others 
the opinion that the ethics of the people are in 
keeping with their experiences. Morals are to 
him not much more than regulations. These 
regulations are for the most part deductions. 
Here is the way he arrives at a fundamental 
criterion of what is virtue : The extremes of 
human volition, he says, are not the measure 
by which rectitude can be ascertained. The 
ancients recommended the mean; neither too 
great an enthusiasm nor too heavy an indiffer- 
ence. Just as the pendulum settles in its 
proper place after oscillating to both sides, so 
moral qualities are compromises between the 
swayings of the passions. Experience and the 
discipline which comes from experience, and 
what is still better self-discipline, these bring 
habits in their train and lay the foundation for 
moral self-sufficiency. 



26 



Maimonides. 



" In the matter of motives," says he, " the 
selection of which is relegated to the individ- 
ual, there is no difference between religion and 
philosophy. The restrictive influence of reli- 
gion is not a pre-determinate, nor is it positive ; 
it is simply corrective." I strip the quaint lan- 
guage of Maimonides and render it in modern 
phraseology as approximately as I can. The 
nature of religion is predominantly of a re- 
straining force; it is prescriptive and origina- 
tive only with reference to the details of worship. 
The stimulating or rather the originative ele- 
ments of conscious purpose come to the surface 
rarely in a system of religion which is tinged 
catechismically. Maimonides insists on a con- 
ception of ethics, which shall not be confined 
to a remedial purpose. It shall, he says, never 
be an apology for either self-indulgence on the 
one hand, or, on the other, for a super-refined 
notion of self-negation or abnegation. I sus- 
pect Maimonides here of a sly dig at the ascetic 
schools of the Christianity of his day, and at 
Mutazilite transcendentalism, which taught the 
fiction of the sensuous kind of compensation, 
notoriously Mohammedan. Asceticism, he says, 
is a revulsion from the extreme of luxurious 
sensuality, justly abhorred, the more since it is 
cloaked under a dissimulating religiousness. 
Transcendentalists, already in the day of Mai- 
monides, as they do even in our day, made 



Maimonides. 



27 



virtue a contemplative, a speculative attitude. 
The agent is to do the virtuous act for virtue's 
sake. If it were allowed to lay open the 
mechanism of such philosophic virtuousness, 
it would be tantamount to a yearning after 
an ideal, to a sort of poetry. This ideal of 
pure morality is not an inner force, but an 
externality, which allures because of its fas- 
cination. Maimonides insists on it that the 
source of the pure act lies within the man and 
that the analysis of motives will prove it. 
Moral force is resident within the agent, and is 
not dependent upon an alluring fiction outside 
of him. A man is morally good in proportion 
to the personal contribution he has made in 
the effort. There is a combat between self- 
consciousness and organism — or as Maimonides 
puts it, an opposition obtains between man 
and sin. But the virtuous man is such only 
if his consciousness has had something to do 
with the selection of the act. Still this struggle 
between the mental factors and the physical 
factors of the organism is not a hostile opposi- 
tion, but a parting off and a balancing. And 
this affects mainly only the non-essential mat- 
ters, such as, for instance, ceremonialism and the 
proprieties are. They are an " After-moral," 
artificial and subventional, in contrast with 
spontaneity, original and basal. 

It may not be apparent how in this Maimoni- 



28 



Maimonides. 



des follows Aristotle. But in the principle 
of the Mean, as the desideratum of moral 
integrity, Maimonides agrees with more phi- 
losophers than the Greek. Even in the most 
recent phase of ethical philosophy, the sub- 
sumption of ethical rules has not gotten farther 
than crowding them under the experiential 
maxim of the golden mean. But Maimonides 
regarded the compromise of selfishness and 
love, the two contradictory states of morals, 
as representing more an art of ethics than a 
science of ethics. On this account he felt the 
need of a farther analysis of motives. If there 
are actually various psychological factors in 
the determination of a motive, it cannot be 
supposed that these are mental phenomena 
in a melee with passions, but kindred facts of 
mind. Why I should rather do this than that, 
is not determined by my personal authority 
over against physical demands, but because I 
contrast by an intuitive logic two unequal, 
though similar motives. Thus Maimonides 
maintains his position among the idealists, 
and has swept the charge of theology from 
him. I am anxious to put this clearly, for 
this position of Maimonides as to ethics has 
been endorsed by all later Jewish philosophers. 
I mention as the most significant Bachja ibn 
Pakuda, — whose " Choboth Haleboboth " car- 
ries this principle of the mental— I should say 



Maimonides, 



29 



spiritual — character of moral motives as far as 
it can be carried legitimately, viz., to constrain 
as unessential, though from the legislative 
point of view they may be serviceable and even 
occasionally necessary, the abandonment of 
many injunctions and prohibitions which have 
the endorsement of tradition, but are not 
entailed by the fundamental principle of pure 
morals. 

Maimonides gave direction to Jewish philos- 
ophy far beyond the immediate compass of 
Mosaism. He had furnished criteria for later 
phases of Jewish thought. 

In the subject we have in hand just now, I 
will allow myself to add that it is a conven- 
tional view, which has gone into literature to a 
regrettable extent, that Judaism has continued 
in its teachings regarding ethics in a monoto- 
nous way ever since its inception. In one 
respect I will not deny it, namely as to specific 
regulations and practices. But as to the aspect 
of ethics as a whole there has been no modi- 
fication. From Moses to Moses Maimonides, 
and from this Moses to Moses Mendelssohn, 
all matters pertaining to religion, as well as to 
morals, were referred to psychology in the last 
instance. An abidance in this attitude I do 
not consider a want of growth ; for I believe 
that beyond the psychological key there is no 
better. The eventful history of the Jews has 



3 o 



Maimonides. 



not affected nor modified the original meaning 
of person and of relationship. It may have 
entailed and forced upon the Jews a deleterious 
depression of the emotions. And in so far as 
sentiments react upon the person and compli- 
cate the original disposition, we may be able 
to notice certain evidences of what bigotry did 
cause ; and this may account for the legalism 
of Moses and for the casuistry of the Rabbis. 
But the conception of morals in the abstract 
and philosophic sense was always that they 
were essentially intuitive. 

I said above that Judaism maintained con- 
tinuously an original psychological conception 
of person and relationship. I repeat it now, 
because I wish to advert to the next subject, 
which, in the philosophy of Maimonides, 
naturally follows from a scientific view of 
morals. I mean the state. Maimonides main- 
tains that as soon as we shall be able to give a 
precise account of morals in the individual, we 
shall have come nearest to the disposal of the 
question how sociality originates. Man, he 
says, is by nature gregarious {ndkhinov Zgqov, 
Adorn M'dini b'teva). He is referred to his 
fellows by the demands of his person. I add, 
by your indulgence, that this need of fellowship 
from the organic side of the individual carries 
in germ every other element for a scientific 
apology for the state. Nature here hints only, 



Maimonides. 



3i 



and the history of the race brings forth the pat- 
ent fact that spiritual communion is necessary. 
But I must continue. Man is naturally social, 
and he is dependent upon various and mutually 
differing relationships with fellows to make his 
life possible, even in the elementary matters. 
I find in this a suggestion of the economic 
principle of division of labor, though I scarcely 
wish to claim that Maimonides knew of politi- 
cal economy as a science. The political con- 
dition of his time admitted of no such notion. 
Politics and statecraft and the arts of govern- 
ing were relegated to some few privileged 
ones, and the thought of sociology was ex- 
ceedingly remote. Not even this had dawned 
upon them, that irresponsible royalty might 
be subjected to criticism. But Maimonides 
recognized the interdependence of man upon 
men, and the diversity of characters as a neces- 
sary condition for the moral status of the 
individual. 

But it must not be supposed that the mutu- 
ality of men makes impossible the distinction 
of some one or some few, above the mass of 
mediocres. Leadership is not a voluntary 
assumption on the part of one person nor an 
enforced yielding up on the part of the people. 
Sovereignty and genial guidance are essential, 
not institutional. As much as the individual 
needs society, so society needs the individual. 



32 



Maimonides. 



If society were simply an aggregate of single 
men, it would fail to respond to the demands 
of humanity. The highest human powers are 
in the service to secure the consistence and 
unity of society. This is a view of hero- 
worship upon the evidence of history of which 
I know no other defender except Emerson. 
Geniuses are not lent for a time. Those who 
lead the humanities of the ages are not out of 
time and place. They are natural products and 
natural causes. Even though we cannot lay our 
fingers upon the pulse of their creative powers, 
they are logically necessary. Society and his- 
tory, the experiences, the shocks, the amenities, 
the monotonies, the exaltations, the thousand- 
fold agencies and patiences of men, have their 
centre and polarity in genius and talent. No 
theory of the history of culture is adequate un- 
less it has room for what is currently termed 
exceptional because obtrusive. No history of 
culture is scientific unless it shows that the 
birth, career, and death, failure and success 
of leaders, is as normal a phenomenon and 
as traceable to social ultimates as the large 
movements themselves. This is more than a 
mere forecast on the part of Maimonides, for 
though he is undeniably prejudiced in favor 
of Mosaism, it is a very thoroughgoing view of 
his. We are so occupied with the worth of 
our heroes as magnificent persons, that we 



Maimonides. 



33 



forget that even such magnitudes might be 
subservient, — subservient to a profound plan 
in which they are only tools. No history of 
civilization has yet been written except in a 
discursive manner. Epochs and occurrences 
in the life of peoples and leaders are treated 
as if they were so many plants which have 
vegetated in turn. Of a graduation of historic 
facts, how one occurrence plays into the other, 
shades off one into the other, each a requisite 
antecedent and a necessary consequent, all 
history without a break, continuous from first 
to last, from now as far as the certainty of law 
will carry us, — on that method no one has yet 
constructed the true philosophy of history. It 
redounds to the credit of Moses Maimonides, 
that, despite the shortcomings of his time as 
to scientific introspection, despite the absence 
of any historic sense in his day, he still has 
a presentiment that there obtains ordered 
arrangement of human affairs in their large 
scope, and that this has an equally fit place for 
the people and for genius. The genius is the 
prophet. Law, L e., administration, is not ac- 
cessory, but a divine institution. Legislation, 
however, in the narrow sense of police 
authority, though it is justly vested with exec- 
utive power, still, in the presence of the supreme 
facts of human nature, is an impertinence which 

is tolerated because it is useful. Law, Maimon- 
3 



34 



Maimonides. 



ides contends, as the groundwork of society, 
is only another expression of society's own 
mode of being. I submit this as the teaching 
of the Jewish Hugo Grotius : It is the right of 
those who constitute the social compact to 
protect themselves against individual violence, 
inasmuch as such violence evidences a flagrant 
perversion of the social instinct, and the 
malevolent agent cannot be in a sound con- 
dition. He lacks one of the attributes of 
humanity. 

The state is supreme in authority, not only 
because it encompasses all the members of the 
community, but also because it is an efficient 
agent in the curriculum of their moral disci- 
pline. The order of importance in the three 
departments of civic interests is: first, the 
state, and consequently the special form of 
government; second, economics perse; third, 
the spiritual matters, for these are what they 
are only in direct proportion and analogy with 
the other two. Both national prosperity and 
national intelligence are dependent for their 
resources and opportunities upon the character 
of government and paternal guardianship of 
the fostering state. 

We see that Maimonides is indebted for the 
positive character of his philosophy to his op- 
position to the Mohammedan school of fatal- 
ism. But he could not avoid falling himself 



Maimonides. 



35 



into the snare of a more polished fatalism. 
There is no clearer case of fatalism than the 
scientific. Still it is only such by an extension 
of the meaning of the word fatalism. There is a 
fatalism of prefiguration, and there is another 
fatalism, which has nothing to do with provi- 
dential ukases. The activity or experience of 
every thing in nature is within the lines which 
the mode of the thing prescribes. This is 
fatalism as little as is the logical constraint of 
the term square, the sides of which must 
always be equal and shorter than the diagonal. 
Nothing can make the sides equal to the 
diagonal. No amount of disdain can make 
this second kind of scientific definiteness kin- 
dred to Oriental fatalism. Maimonides must 
have been aware of this distinction; and in the 
matter of morals and of polity it is evident that 
he was. There must be, he says, a reciprocity 
between people and legislators on the ground 
of the natural law. 

I ought now to offer some slight exposition 
of the doctrine of prophecy for which Mai- 
monides is distinguished in Jewish literature. 
But the subject is properly theological and is 
so treated at length in the " More " ; and I 
believe it is on this account irrelevant in a dis- 
cussion of his philosophy in general. I may 
say that the prophet is described by Maimoni- 
des as a supremely endowed human being, 



36 



Maimonides. 



whose delicate sensitiveness is a fact of his con- 
stitution, economic condition, and consequent 
exhilaration or depression. Prophetic genius 
is one of a class. But Maimonides reserves for 
himself this limitation, that the genial endow- 
ment in itself is a mystery. How far soever 
we carry the analysis, and however we feel the 
pulse of that splendid life, we cannot fix upon 
the element which makes it different from all 
others. The prophet may be simply a rational 
person, but what gives him the faculty of ex- 
haustive insight and foresight, it must be 
admitted, is simply an act of the will of God. 

In a general review of the philosophy of 
Maimonides it will be pardoned, I hope, if 
matters dear to the student of the " More " 
have had insufficient attention. I will content 
myself, in conclusion, to state that the Jewish 
adage : " From Moses unto Moses there has 
been none like Moses," applied to Maimonides 
most worthily. He holds an honored su- 
premacy in Jewish philosophy. 

It is to be noted, however, that in the 
history of thought a period of rationalism 
has generally been followed by a relapse into 
mysticism, and that no single large movement 
of liberalization and renaissance has been ex- 
empt from this reversion. It was so in the 
case of Maimonides. His successors were the 
Rabbanites and Kabbalists. These endeavored 



Maimonides. 



37 



with all the malice of their bigotry to stigma- 
tize the " More." The grave of Maimonides 
was disgraced. He was excommunicated even 
in death, and a few years after his death his 
work, denounced by fanatics, was burned in 
the market-place at Paris and Toulouse as 
dangerous and heretical. The Inquisition, 
with its prompt and most chivalric persuasion, 
suppressed the study of all Jewish philosophy. 
But all this could not avail. The pseudo- 
graphs and forgeries of the " Kabbala," of the 
" Sohar," etc., met with deserved obloquy, 
while the " More " has grown in respect and 
reverence. 

I cannot speak of his other works, such as 
his work on logic (" Higgayan "), his codex 
(" Yad Hachazakah "), which is the foundation 
of all later elaborations of Jewish law. The 
composition of the latter work would in itself 
have been sufficient to secure to him enduring 
fame in the history of Judaism. But I have 
refrained from speaking of these for the reason 
that they are foreign to a consideration of his 
philosophy. 

Maimonides may be designated as the Aris- 
totle of Judaism. So Gratz calls him. Jewish 
thought is exceptional in the history of relig- 
ions, because it appropriates and domesticates 
the world's thinking. Of this we have a striking 
instance in the manner in which Maimonides 



38 



Maimonides. 



readily imported Aristotelianism into Jewish 
philosophy. The universal presence of God 
and the plasticity of the human soul, the kin- 
ship of all life, the conviction that everywhere 
is the throb of life and of thought,— these are 
the teaching of the Jew of Spain, of the Jew 
to-day, and of the best in the world, and as 
in the eleventh century so also in the more 
promising nineteenth. 



THE END. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF 
RELIGION 

$1.50 

G. P, PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London 
1889 

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Detroit Journal. 

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. . . The general tone of the book is serious and profound ; 
one feels that the writer has reviewed the old topics and read 
the modern authorities with a fresh mind, and considered them 
from an individual point of view. . . . Such sentences, 
recalling in their terseness and sometimes in their discon- 
nectedness the Essays of Emerson, give some idea of the 
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JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 



il This is a book which religious and philosophic students of 
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The work as a whole is emphatically a good one and deserves 
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The wealth of ideas (of the book) makes it well worth while 
to study it attentively. . . . It is a book which the 
students of religion cannot afford to pass by unread. " — Uni- 
versalist Quarterly. 



MAIMONIDES 



A PAPER READ BEFORE THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF 
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 

ANN ARBOR, MICH., JANUARY 19, 189O 



RABBI LOUIS GROSSMANN, D.D., 

AUTHOR OF 44 JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION " 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 

P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
&(jc |lmckerbocker jpwss 
1890 



7? S 

(A 



nrannn 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 899 229 8 




